Admittedly I only have PSE7 but I was wondering if anyone else wondered if photoshop was worth the hassle. I see some wonderful work on line and in magazines

but I notice a huge number of problems raised by other useres on this forum and I have spent obver half an hour trying to successfully converta pic to black and white but retain two gold wedding rings incolour in the shot. the conversion went fine but the edges of the rings took on a red shade and when trying to use the stamp tool I find that you cant move colour from one part of the image to the other, it works on a tiny scale and I cant enlarge the image to work on like I can with DPP so I am left trying to make adjustments on a 6x4 image and just cant get the detail.Does it improve on later versions, could I send the part worked image back to DPP to work on?

When I open the image in editor it comes in a 6x4ish size. If I click on the square icon on the top right of the box it doesnt get any bigger and I dont know where the icon is to make the image larger.

I open what I do get, use the lasso/marching ants around the edges of the two rings and invert the image so i can then make everything but the two gold rings B&W. When I save it though I get red edging/shadows between the B&W and some of the retained colour area.

I also have problems getting the colour to do the stamping, where in DPP you grab a colour and can put it anywhere in the image, in PSE7 it seems to only work part of the time and when it doesnt it comes out black.

I havent been able to send it back to DPP, I just thought that if I could invert the B&W and colour in PSE I could then work on the stamping and fine tuning in DPP which I find easy to use.

You don't use an icon to zoom the view. Use the magnifying glass tool (the zoom tool) or just press ctrl + the equal sign key. You can think of it as command plus the plus sign but since you don't need shift adobe prefers to think of it as command plus the equal sign these days.

I don't understand at all what you mean by "color stamping", sorry, and I have DPP, but it should not be necessary.

Here's a simple way to do this in PSE 7:

1. Open your image and press Ctrl+J to duplicate the background layer.

2. In the layers palette, click the new layer to make sure it's active, then go to Enhance>Convert to Black and White to turn that layer black and white.

3. Get out the eraser tool and erase the rings to let the color show through from the underlying layer.

You'll get some targetted advice for this specific image if you would include the image in your post.

In general, with PSE7, you could make a duplicate of your colour background layer, convert the duplicated layer to B&W, then use the Eraser tool on that B&W image to carefully erase areas of the B&W layer to reveal the colour image below. Zoom in to get an accurate view of your erasing.

Thanks Barbara I shall give that a try. By colour stamping I mean choosing a sample area in DPP stamp tool and transfering that sample to the area I want to stamp. Cheers Ken, I hadnt realised I could add pics so you can see I am having trouble smoothing the edges of the rings but I shall try your advice

Thanks for the help, the second picture posted is the one I wanted, the ring colours are as taken and the background is now B&W but it is interesting to see the number of variations on how to get the same result.

Glad to help. You're absolutely right about PSE usually having more than one way of achieving an effect. With PSE10, you not only gain all the bug fixes since PSE7, but also features (specifically the ability to create a layer mask) that make your example very easy to do.